Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Book Review: 36 Streets by T.R. Napper (Cyberpunk/SciFi)

    I stumbled across "36 Streets" by T.R. Napper last month, and was blown away when I sat down to read it. I grew up on cyberpunk fiction, but personally find a lot of modern attempts at cyberpunk to be a bit.. meh. Too many examples of authors falling in love with some perceived cyberpunk aesthetic and spending days describing things, but there's rarely an underlying theme or concept really worth exploring.

  • I am alive (2)

    It's been a few months of my absence here. November, December, January are long and dark in Poland. Only February brings a little more sun. It knocked me out of my old habits. I fell into a daily routine. It wasn't bad, including reading /Treasure Island/ (by R. L. Stevenson) to my son in the evenings. In the evenings there was no strength left for anything else. Only my blog in Polish remained active, because writing there requires the least from me.

    All of this would be a normal, miserable life, if not for the fact that I finally landed in Gophersphere again. I started Bongusta, Gopher Club, my bookmarks. These few months in Gophersphere passed as if unnoticed. I saw many posts from my friends (sure, not everyone knows that they are my friends - but how do you call someone you read about and know a little about). I was very happy about all of this, that maybe I didn't have the energy for it, but others persisted in their habits.

  • X-Filesposting #2: End Game and Via Negativa

    I'll be blunt: I don't think any of the mythology episodes should be in the top twenty. Maybe not the top forty. Yes, that's right: I don't think there's a single mythology episode that makes the top twenty percent of all X-Files episodes.

    (For the uninitiated: X-Files episodes can be divided into two broad categories, "mythology" and "monster of the week." "Monster of the week" is what it says on the tin: the agents chase down some particular creature/suspect/case, which we (usually) never hear from again. "Mythology" episodes are lore episodes. They are at best inconsistent and at worst incomprehensible. Both movies were extended mythology episodes.)

    Anyway, "End Game" is the second of a two-parter that starts with "Colony" (#12), so I watched both. It's been decades since I've seen either, and even Thrillist's helpful screenshot of the Arctic submarine did not jog my memory.

• Politics and World Events

  • RIP Airey Neave (1916-1979)

    Airey Neave MP was assassinated 46 years ago today, leading to a radical change in Tory and Labour policy on Northern Ireland. His son and grandchildren were friends-of-a-friend, so I've met the family once or twice, including a Christmas dinner. Neave himself I've always found fascinating, and history would have been very different had he survived.

    And I'm not the only one: there is a very strange piece of early 2000s internet literature in which Neave is a major character: it's called "What If Gordon Banks Had Played?". It defies genre: though it's presented as "alternative history", it's also a thriller, and a fictional conspiracy theory. In the story, an event in 1970 leads to Neave surviving and playing a central role. He is one of many mainstream politicians presented extremely negatively in the story.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Auto restarting a Mac Mini running Ubuntu after power loss

    A few months ago, I swapped the server that runs Kennedy from a circa mid-2011 Mac Mini (Macmini5,1) to a more "modern" Mac mini from late 2014 (Macmini7,1). It has a faster (though still Intel) CPU, a larger aftermarket SSD, and a larger secondary hard drive. I put Ubuntu LTS on it and went on with my life.

    However, I would get emails that Kennedy was down, and I'd look in the basement and see the server was, in fact, powered off. This was odd because I had a UPS. But even without a UPS, the Mac Mini hardware should power back on when it restores power. The 2011 Mac Mini, even with Ubuntu installed, would do this, so it seemed like a hardware feature, not an OS feature. I wasn't sure why the 2014 one was not.

  • Fonts are op

    Fonts are OP. As a web dev and Vivaldi user, I've noticed how some web pages use fonts to display icons/symbols instead of images. Granted, that's always what fonts have done, but it's a bit harder to grasp because we think of text as t ext, not codes that show the corresponding letter/glyph. There are Unicode characters for virtually everything, from trash cans to computers to envelopes. The reason I generally notice them is because when I force monospace on a webpage , it will just replace any undefined characters with a hollow rectangle.

    Most Unicode characters are not defined in monospace fonts, at least as far as I'm aware.

  • text justification in emacs

    What is the key for text justification in emacs? How to rename window in tmux? Hah! I've got it.

  • dreaming in emacs

    When I was a kid, my mother went through a deeply New Age-y phase. I am now the person who can give you an ironclad scientific argument debunking Western astrology while also drawing up your birth chart.

    I also, for many years, kept a dream journal. I spent hours poring over dictionaries of dream symbols. As a kid, my dreams seemed obscure, mysterious, full of meaning.

    My dreams are a lot more straightforward these days. My most recent grief-related dreams, for example, featured me begging people to understand that I have spent years hallucinating a decent life and a decent job when really something awful had happened. It doesn't take a dictionary of arcane associations to understand that one.

    Last night's dreams weren't too hard to decode either. Every single one of them involved Emacs.

    I've been cramming Emacs recently. I'm in love with it. I want to ask "where has this been all my life?", except the answer is "there." It's just that no one introduced me to it until recently.